How We Manage To Run a Successful SEM Campaign With Almost NO Budget?

15 Tips on How to Use a Small PPC Budget and Have Success With Your Search Engine Marketing Campaign.

If you want to make the most of your search engine marketing campaign, but you only have a limited budget for PPC, then you may be wondering how to enhance your strategy. Fortunately, the truth is that you don’t necessarily need a huge marketing budget to discover the benefits of PPC in your SEM campaign, all you need to do is learn how to optimize your campaigns.

When you only have a small budget to work with, it’s essential to set the right expectations for the size and scope of your account. Figure out how many clicks each day you want to receive (be realistic) and go from there. For instance, if your budget per month is around $1,000 and your average cost per click is $1.50, then you’ll be able to get around 400 clicks per month.

Remember that many channels, including AdWords, may exceed your daily budget limit to help you get the most out of your clicks, but you shouldn’t exceed your budget for the full month.

Establish Your Goals

Most marketers have multiple goals to support per account. A limited budget will reduce the number of campaigns or goals that you can pursue. Some of the most common goals include product and brand consideration, sales, leads, and brand awareness.

Before you start spending money anywhere, make sure you know which of your goals are most important to you right now. For instance, if you’re just getting started with marketing, it’s probably more important to raise brand awareness before you look at sales.

Ad Scheduling

An ad scheduling strategy helps to control your budget by running advertisements specifically on certain days, and at certain times during the day. If your business is open during specific office hours, then it’s a good idea to set your ads, so they only run when you’re available to take sales calls. On the other hand, if you’re selling online and you’re always open, you can check to see when your target audience is most likely to be online.

Manage your Match Types

A great way to control your budget is to make sure that you study up on match types and how they trigger certain ads. Combined with geotargeting strategies and careful ad scheduling, you can make sure that you’re only spending money on the most qualified leads.

Most of the time, you’ll have to experiment with different match types. Working with a limited budget means that you’ll need to get creative if you want to get the biggest benefit from your budget.

Geotargeting

Geotargeting is one of the first settings you’ll need to get right with your AdWords strategy. If you need to target specific cities, or states because of your location, or your ability to serve a specific group of customers, then you’ll need to address this straight away. The smaller the geographical area that you target with your campaign, the less money you’ll spend. Just make sure you’re focusing your attention on the area most likely to deliver the best traffic.

Call Only Campaigns

Sometimes, if you have a particularly small PPC budget, then you might not be able to afford to build a professional landing page. In that case, the chances are that you’ll want to drive people to your business by asking them to call or contact you. A call-only campaign is a great way to save some money because you’re not asking people to click on an URL and go to your website.

Aim for Competition

When you’re working on your PPC strategy, use your portfolio bids to improve your chances of beating the main competitors in your space with the “target outranking share” option. This process allows you to create a rule by adding the domain to outrank, as well as the percentage of the time that you would like to outrank your competitors. Focus on outranking the competitors in your local area for the best and cheapest results.

Try Remarketing

Make sure that you gain more awareness for your brand by using remarketing display advertisements for your website visitors. If you’re paying per click, then you won’t pay anything for when people simply see your ad. A little bit of display advertising can be enough to expand your reach as a growing company significantly.

Get Your Keywords Right

When it comes to choosing keywords, remember that bid values for generic keywords can sometimes be very high. Look for longer and more unique keywords that will help you to compete more effectively with a smaller budget. A good option is to find some long-tail keywords that are more nuanced, as this will help you to reach a specific niche of customers.

Working with High Volume Keywords

Sometimes, competitive and high-volume keywords can be a good addition to your marketing strategy, but they do get expensive at times and put a serious dent in your marketing budget. Consider placing a maximum bid on the amount that you’re happy to pay.

Remember Negative Keywords

When it comes to addressing keywords, don’t underestimate the benefits of having an extensive list for your “negative” keywords. Remember, you don’t want people to come and click on your content if they’re not going to buy your products. Refine your options by creating an extensive negative keyword list that you can update regularly.

Make Sure Tracking Is Set Up

Focus on getting tracking set up throughout your PPC platform and web analytics so that you can measure your performance and ensure that you’re getting the right results. The data that you collect will be critical in helping you to decide whether you should change your strategy.

Avoid Dynamic Search Ads

Though Dynamic Search ads can be a powerful addition to a pay-per-click campaign, they’re not always the right option for people with a limited budget. These ads aren’t triggered by the specific keywords you choose. Instead, they display based on the keywords that appear in the content of your landing page. Although this might seem convenient, it’s not always ideal for getting relevant clicks and impressions.

Remember Ad Extensions

In the right circumstances, ad extensions draw additional attention to your ad and provide your customers with information that you couldn’t place in the ad copy. You can use your ad extensions to inform your customers of things like your phone number and local address. Google also offers the option to create dynamic ad extensions too.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Finally, when people do click on your PPC campaigns, you want to make sure that they have the highest possible chance of converting. With that in mind, make sure that you create highly effective and targeted landing pages for your customers. Google judges landing page quality based on parameters like content originality, transparency, and navigability. You won’t get any conversions from poorly structured landing pages.

Remember, low-budget accounts can still be effective, all you need to do is figure out how to use them correctly.